Questions available for discussion or reflection

A set of questions for discussion or reflection is available for A Place to Breathe. To receive them, email Lloyd Edwards at lebook57@yahoo.com. They are free and are in .pdf format. 

I just finished reading Lloyd Edwards new book A Place to Breathe: Creating the World That God Intended and Still Does.  I highly recommend it, but only if you are open to personal growth and societal change in realizing the reign of God in the human condition.  If you prefer living in a survival mode of life, struggling to maintain the status quo while sometimes hankering after the way things used to be (you believe); then, avoid Lloyd’s book.  It will only aggravate you and you probably would not finish it anyway.  But, we can always hope for continual transformation toward the reign of God in our lives, regardless of how comfortable stasis seems.  Read the book.  It may sneak up on you with something new and good and God.

Your brother in Christ,

Blaney+
By the Rev. Blaney Pridgen -- used by permission

From the Foreword to A Place to Breathe

This is the book I wish I had read many years ago. As a boy I heard hundreds of sermons, most of them excellent, I’m sure. But I remember being impatient with most of them, because I wanted the preacher to cut out all the stories and flowery language, and just tell me what to do. I wanted the specific plan of action that resulted from the narratives. I have lived with that want for a long time... One of my basic questions was: how do you put it all together? I read a number of theologians, including Tillich, Barth, Pannenberg, Teilhard, Bonhoeffer, Neibuhr, and Rahner. All were helpful, but all brought heavy philosophical concepts to their articulation of the faith. What I wanted to know was less intellectual than the questions they addressed: how do you put it all together at the practical, daily, lived level? Do you really need all the philosophical background to be an intelligent and thoughtful Christian? Tillich wrote of the theological circle in which theology offered answers to questions raised by philosophers, but I was no philosopher, nor was any other Christian I knew. Were our questions worthwhile? Is the Christian faith primarily explanatory, a response to philosophical questions? What if I am not asking the “right” questions? This book is my answer to those questions. Given the Bible stories, the history of the church, and the great body of dogma and doctrine that has developed over the centuries, what does a person of faith do? And how does such a person put it all together as a practical, useful way of thinking about and acting out the Christian life? I share my answer in print, certainly not as any kind of authoritative final word, but in a sense as an invitation to explore, to question, to put together the reader's own version. Each reader will have different specific questions and issues, and so will come to a different overall synthesis, but my experience with my fine teachers and with their generosity leads me to believe that others may have the same questions I had, and that my sharing – in this book – will be helpful to them as my teachers' generous sharing was to me.

From Chapter 1: What is God About?

In traditional rites for the Holy Eucharist (Mass, Holy Communion,…), the opening call and response has to do with the reign or Kingdom of God. That call and response goes like this:

Leader: “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”

Congregation:“And blessed be His [sic] Kingdom, now and forever. Amen.”1

In those two lines we sum up the church’s mission. But we often say those words unthinkingly, without awareness of their import. How many of us can say what the Kingdom of God is, or what it means to bless God or God’s kingdom? And if we cannot describe it in our own words, what do we mean when we say it? And if we do not know what it means, how can we possibly “work, pray, and give” to “bring in the Kingdom?”2

1 The Book of Common Prayer, p. 355

2 The Book of Common Prayer, p. 856